For God and Country. Mark Bowlin

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      December 27, 1943

      1000 Hours

      CINC Southwest Headquarters, Monte Soratte, Italy

      Major Douglas Grossmann sat alone at a conference table in a mahogany-paneled room, where two months before he had received the most depressing news possible: orders to establish a spy network in the Naples–Caserta–Cassino area of operations and infiltrate the American high command. On paper, it sounded challenging but doable. He was more American than German after all, and he had done it before at Salerno. But in practice, it would be more than challenging. At Salerno, the Allies were disorganized, but by the time they took Naples and continued their march north along the Italian peninsula, they had networks of their own. Intelligence collection networks of spies and collaborators. Counterintelligence networks manned by hard men—professionals who played the great game to win. He had thought it a death sentence.

      Then a disagreeable prick of a colonel had told Grossmann that good men were dying by the millions on the Eastern Front. All German soldiers were expected to do their part, including dying if necessary, and he was asked, “What makes you special?”

      That’s the kind of question that a soldier might have an answer to, but can’t really articulate to an unpleasant superior officer, so Grossmann had taken his orders, fulfilled his mission as best he could, and come back to the German lines. But it hadn’t been without cost. Now he was sitting in that same room, waiting for the same disagreeable prick of a colonel, in order to find out the consequences of his last mission and perhaps learn something of his next assignment.

      Grossmann had been given a week off and now it was time to get back to the war. He was ready. Christmas had been spent alone in a small apartment that he kept near the Piazza Navona. He had been tempted to put on civilian clothes and cross the river to go mingle with the crowd at Saint Peter’s Square, but he decided to stay in bed and sleep instead. He was a deeply, deeply lapsed Lutheran in any case, and had no desire to participate in a Catholic ceremony simply because he was lonely.

      That was the crux of the problem—the source of his discontent. Major Grossmann was lonely. His comrade and good friend, Captain Mark Gerschoffer, had been killed at San Pietro by an American captain named Berger, and his own source with access to the American camp reported that the Texan had tortured his friend for information before executing him.

      His source, Antoniette Bernardi, was the one person he would have liked to spent Christmas with, but she had gone with her family to a villa they owned in the north of Italy to spend the Christmas season skiing. Grossmann had to call in several favors to get the necessary passes and arrange the rail transport, but Bernardi had earned it all. She was Germany’s premier agent in Italy.

      She was an amazingly dangerous woman. Grossmann knew that she lied fluently and manipulated men like puppets. She was beautiful, hypnotic, and a dedicated fascist, and in the words of his predecessor at the Rome station, she had “a heart as cold as a witch’s caress.” He knew all of these things and more. She unnerved him, yet he still desired her. He knew that if she were to seduce him—it would never be the other way around—she would own a majority of his soul, which would never be returned. Intellectually, he knew that to become Bernardi’s lover was akin to signing a Faustian pact with the devil, but like Faust, he dallied with the notion that losing his soul might be worth it. He certainly would never really control events in this world again. He had sighed on that Christmas morning and wondered if she had been there with him, at that moment, whether he would have signed the pact. He probably would have, he reflected.

      This Monday, however, was a different day. It was time to leave the self-pity, the loneliness, and the unrequited desire behind and focus on work. But what was he to do, and what was the High Command’s plan for their German-American intelligence officer?

      He had been told his last mission was a success even if he personally did not see it as such. Grossmann had penetrated the Fifth Army headquarters on so many occasions that he knew the Italian workers in the canteen by name, and Bernardi’s work had been nothing short of spectacular. She was singularly successful in convincing Allied officers to demonstrate their worth to her by discussing units, locations, and destinations over a bottle of wine or in bed, and she had provided time-sensitive information on Allied operations that had been used to great effect in delaying the Anglo-American advance up the peninsula. Her greatest coup was the discovery of a stockpile of American mustard gas aboard a liberty ship in the Italian port of Bari. Weeks later, the Allies were still cleaning up the mess from the Luftwaffe bombing of the John Harvey.

      All good things come to an end, however. Grossmann’s ring was broken up, although he didn’t know exactly how. When Gerschoffer had been taken prisoner and reportedly executed by Captain Berger, Grossmann suspected that his cover was blown. He certainly wasn’t inclined to wait around and find out. Grossmann hurriedly collected Antoniette Bernardi from Caserta, and they made their escape, via Naples and Mondragone, to the sea. In a contract Camorra boat, one with a rich history of smuggling cigarettes, people, and narcotics, Grossmann and Bernardi successfully made a nighttime transit to Gaeta in German-occupied Italy.

      Grossmann had been told to take some time off before reporting to work again. He would have liked to return to Germany to see his father in Darmstadt, but ironically, he wasn’t sure he would be able to arrange the necessary transportation for himself. So he stayed in Rome and thought.

      He had spent one evening with the wife of an Italian officer—an unfortunate soldier captured in Russia—but she was becoming resentful of the German occupation and carped incessantly about the hardships she had to endure. When he had left her flat the next morning he had tossed some lire on her entryway table in respect of happier memories, and he knew he wouldn’t see her again.

      As for other carnal pursuits, it seemed that the remaining Italian ladies of his acquaintance had recently found either God or patriotism—their motivation made no difference to Grossmann as they were no longer sleeping with German officers. The lack of other available women had driven his thoughts back to Bernardi, and from there he alternately found himself wishing for her return or a transfer back to Paris. Perhaps that would be the best of all possible worlds: nightclubs and French women and fine wines and no Antoniette.

      In his meeting with his Abwehr superiors this morning, he thought he might press the argument that he should return to Paris. The Allied landings in France were only a matter of time, and his services would be needed there. Too many Americans would be flooding into France and the Low Countries for him to be personally identified in that theater. It would be safer there.

      Grossmann had been waiting twenty minutes past the appointed time of the meeting before the colonel arrived. The delay made him both anxious and irritable. Taking the counsel of his fears, he began to worry that he was in trouble—that despite the initial praise, he would be blamed for Gerschoffer’s death and the subsequent collapse of his network. Christ, he thought, they’re going to send me to the Russian front.

      That was the preeminent thought on his mind as the door finally opened and in strode the disagreeable colonel. Grossmann leapt to his feet, offered a crisp salute, and was waved to his seat by his superior as the colonel hanged his overcoat and hat on a rack in the corner of the room.

      “Major СКАЧАТЬ